This popular dinosaur might have been as smart as a primate, according to study

Were dinosaurs simply brainless beasts, incapable of strategy, adaptation and cooperation? Not really, according to a researcher who has just published the results of her study, in which she argues that the brains of theropods (a group of bipedal dinosaurs to which the T-Rex belongs) were highly developed.

Birds are the dinosaurs of today

Described as a bloodthirsty superpredator, the T-Rex may have secretly been a genius which would make it even more terrifying than expected! But how did it manage to calculate the intelligence of an animal that has been extinct for millions of years? In a study just published in the Journal of Comparative Neurology, she estimated the number of neurons in its brain using bird brains as a reference.

In a video she explains:

Technically, today's birds are dinosaurs. They are the descendants of the ones that survived that asteroid that hit the Earth 65 million years ago (...)

So if we can calculate how many neurons there are in the brain of a bird of a certain size and what was the size of the brain of a bird-like dinosaur, then we can calculate how many neurons there were in a dinosaur brain.

The T-Rex could have handled tools

This is where it gets interesting. Using this method, this researcherestimated the intelligence of a T-Rex. The star dinosaur of Jurassic Park would have been endowed with a brain weighing 343 grams, whose brain stem had 3,289,000,000 neurons. By comparison, a baboon's brain has 2,875,000,000 neurons.

With such cognitive abilities, the T-Rex could therefore have accomplished real feats:

Today's birds with that many neurons, such as parrots or crows, are able to solve problems and create their own tools and their own culture, which means that the T-Rex already had everything it took to do the same thing.

In other words, the Earth was already populated by highly intelligent creatures before the arrival of the asteroid that wiped them out. But it also means that without this impact, our planet might be home to T-Rex engineers, workers, athletes and painters. It would certainly be interesting to see these dinosaurs in the modern world.

This article was translated from Gentside FR.

Sources used:

Journal of Comparative Neurology: Theropod dinosaurs had primate-like numbers of telencephalic neurons